TASK FORCE X

By Charles A. Rawlings

A Post correspondent sails on a troop transport, tells how it
feels when Jap torpedo bombers drop by for a visit.

(The Saturday Evening Post -- 5 June 1943)

For three days, every time we looked over the harbor, the big gray ships
were there, anchored far out. The blue-gray color of the ships and the sun
brown of the men at their rails were the only somber note in the harbor. It
was one of the big sea paddocks of the American war in the Pacific and it
wore the garish colors of the South Pacific's land and sea.

The troops were Army contingents--infantry with their packs and rifles,
and ammunition stowed under them in the lower holds. They were part of a
movement to the northward to consolidate an island that had been won, and then,
perhaps, move on toward Japan. The fighting was over for the moment where
they were going, but it was not over in the air and water that lay between,
and there was a tenseness and expectancy in the look of the transports that
does not come when one looks at loaded ships waiting to move from port to
port back home. They had been modern passenger liners with a turn of speed
before the war. Now they were well armed, with light ack-ack guns mounted on
their ample decks and superstructures, and they cruised with a fine destroyer
screen. The designation given the flotilla had a fighting sound. Its name was
Task Force X. The command, however, after the custom of convoys, bore the
grand name of commodore (Ingolf N. Kiland, CAPT, USN) and he flew his flag, not
in one of the fighting ships but in a transport. He was a four-striper in the
Navy and had been in the same class at Annapolis as the transport's skipper,
also a Navy captain. They looked somewhat alike, both medium-sized, heavy-set
men of middle age with wrinkles about the eyes and the weathering of this Pacific
war, which differs from the ruddy weathering of the Atlantic because of the
constant
sweating and a slight oriental tinge of yellow from atabrine that
appears on those who work the coasts. The two captains were happy to be together
again as they had been twenty-odd years before at school.

"You are probably as uncomfortable aboard as the rest of us," the skipper
said. "A crowded ship and heat and this damned humidity. It is going to
get much worse. I'd give you the run of the bridge, but this time I have a commodore."

The commodore's eyes twinkled. "He's not spoofing me with that talk,"
he said. "All he's given me up here is the whistle lanyard for emergency
turns and a right to run the TBS (talk between ships) radio. What do we
expect? Why, Tojo's got ants in his pants from the defeat up north. He
may try for a little face with us."

Below, the big ship was an oven from the heat steel hulls gather from
the sun and their own engine-room fires and the cooking fires in their galleys.
The tropical nights were not cool enough to penetrate her and the heat stayed
even, night and day. It was the only heat I have ever known that deserved
the adjective, "crawling."

The upper decks were long corridors, and doors with sliver doorknobs
instead of steel dogs, and a central stairway, and solid rows of staterooms
that had been designed to house a man and a woman in luxury back in the
days of bright night lights and open ports and peace. Now, dimly lit by
blue battle lamps, they were crowded with a half dozen steel bunks set in
double layers.

The holds that had smelled once with the deal and hemp and burlap smell
of general cargo reeked now with the heavy odor of troops. Stretching back
from the hatchways into the dark recesses was tier after tier of pipe bunks.
The bunks could sleep 1200 men, but there were not enough of them. Cots that
could be stowed in the daytime filled the narrow passageways at night. Then,
when the hatches were closed to darken ship, the air in those holds stirred
only with the breath of the men, the flail of their tossing bodies and arms,
as they dreamed in sweat-drenched sleep.

The departure of Task Force X was as silent as the gray dawn that watched
it. The destroyers swung into the steaming screen ahead and the big ships
took station astern. It was roughly the pattern of a broad,squat spear,
sharp and quick of blade, stout and heavy of shaft. There was a tenseness,
a hushed expectancy in the air. Cargoes of material are millions of dollars,
vital adjuncts of war, but they are cold and can be almost forgotten under
way. Cargoes of men packed tight and warm and red in the holds, sleeping
over bilges filled with cases of .30-caliber ammunition, are something else.
Troop transport is a poignant business.

Task Force X got on with it. The officers' wardroom was bright and
achatter with first breakfast. It had been the bar and great lounge when
the liner was a lady. It was trimmed in golden-yellow hardwood, with
modernistic bas-relief murals in pastel. Sunlight streaming in through big
ports shone on clean table linen and silverware. The tables were crowded
with 100 officers, infantry and Navy sitting together. There were scrambled
eggs and bacon on the menu, and the eternal wheat cakes and sausage that
Americans must have on the thermal equator or the Arctic Circle.

There were two doctors at our table. One was a commander, CDR W. Patton,
MC, USN, who belonged to the ship and the other, a major, was traveling with
the troops. His hospital unit had gone on ahead of him and he was unhappy
about that. He comforted himself that there were many men from his home town
aboard. The place was Hartford, or New London, or Bridgeport--some place
in Connecticut. Our troops were part of a division that had been known
originally as the 1st Connecticut, he explained.

Dan Coffey, our chief bos'n, was at the table. He was a wise, stout
burgher of the sea, the sort of man Poseidon loves. He had a wife and daughters
and a brick house somewhere that he called home, and a feeling of kinship and
domicile with twenty ports whose names his family could not even pronounce.
He had grown up in the old Navy and been a chief petty officer for years.
None too enthusiastically, he had taken a commission for this war, and as
if trying to make the change over to officer and gentleman by act of Congress
more convincing to himself, he had donned a pair of rimless spectacles.
But the commission stripes and the scholarly glasses could not change him.
"Chief," everybody called him, and there was not a bottle that popped a
stealthy cork within three decks of him that he could not smell nor one trick
of running his crowded deck that he did not know.

Father Foley was the chaplain and Dan Coffey's boon shipmate and confessor.
They shared the same batch and sat beside each other at table.
Father Fogey had been a chief signalman in the last war, and had gone to a
seminary and taken Orders afterward. He had a parish in Philadelphia and
had roared his way back to sea over objections about age and weight. He
was a jolly and understanding ship's priest, quite handsome in his officer';s
cloth with the small gold cross on his collar. He hated sin, understood the
small comforts of the flesh and loved his boys. He had been able to hider
his altar wine so that Dan Coffey had never been able to find it.

We journeyed north like that, with laughter and jokes and yarns--as if
there was no sense in thinking always about danger. The troops, healthy,
lean youngsters who had been toughened by two months of training jungle
warfare in the New Hebrides, had dismissed it, too, after nothing happened
the first day and night at sea. They swarmed at the rails and lolled in
the personnel-landing boats that crowded our main deck.

But the ship lived with the danger. She was a tight ship. She demanded
a tenseness at gun drill, and the sound of feet on the deck over my head answering
the routine call to general quarters that comes every morning and night
to every Navy ship at sea never once shuffled, but always ran. "Lead em!"
our 20-mm. gun shields shouted. The command had been stenciled on the steel
shields in big white letters. The crews, seamen and cooks and pantry men,
and here and there a cox'n, swung the lean muzzles of their mounts, pretending
the little clouds were Aichis and Mitsubishi. They brought the sights hard
on and then swung ahead as they counted "one-two-three" and then pulled the
mute triggers. They were crews full of fight, and the loaders and magazine
boys would burr their lips and make the "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba" sound of a .20 mm.
casting its small fragments of lightning, and the gunners would shake their
shoulders and arms as if the guns were alive and racking them with their
jumping recoil. "Lead 'em", the gunner's mates, watching, cried. "Always
lead 'em!"

The troops watched, slightly disdainful, as regulars would watch the
drilling of militia. The blue dungarees of the gun crews made them look like
a pick-up army. "Lead 'em!" became a good-natured wisecrack, shouted on the
crowded ladders.

We could be in the middle of the submarine very soon.

"Subs are the cans' job," Dan Coffey said. "No one or two subs are
going to bother us, with all those cans cocked. A fleet of them might try
it. We'd sink plenty."

There were nights when it was beautiful on deck. The troops were allowed
to sleep there, a half company at a time, and they had learned to let the
night air salve their prickly heat. Heat rash comes differently to different
men and there were bare bellies and groins and buttocks all about, cooling
in the moonlight. The exposure could not be complete, for every man had been
ordered to wear his clothing. Many of the bad burns of this war have come
to men when bodies were not properly clothed. The split-second flash of
torpedo and ammunition explosions have burned exposed flesh to the bone and
left untouched parts covered with the thin gauze of a skivvy shirt.

The old friends, the Great Bear and the North Star, were gone from the
sky, and one who has lived with them and used them as the feel of a familiar
door jam in the dark to orient the rest of a room, cannot bare to use the
Southern Cross that way at once, but some hunt it out amid the strange white
stars in the black savannah of the southern sky. But splendid Orion burned
his great Belt and jeweled Sword directly overhead, and you could look aloft
at him and shut out the breathless sea and the fetid tropic smells and the
bitter yellow enemy, and smell the frost in the air and smell the crisp white
snow sparkling on the February fields of home.

Ahead in the hot moonlight, the destroyers were small shapes carved out
of obsidian and green jade. Alongside, our sister transports silently kept
pace, their big superstructures like moonlit, deserted ruins. At our guns
the watches stood behind the breast-high shields. Only the occasional movement
of a helmet, like a Trojan helmet watching from a moonlit casement atop
Troy's walls, showed that wee were awake and on lookout. Our floating city
was as populous as old Troy, thousands of sweat-damp men asleep.

Task Force X brought up the disarmingly cool, hush dawn. It ran its
steady eighteen (twelve knots) knots through one more shimmering white noon.
It carried on into the breathless afternoon and watched the sun go down in
Japanese water. The moon took over once more.

Hidden behind it, Japan's attack was forming. The destroyers had been
insisting that something was hiding in the haze astern since four o'clock
in the afternoon. A secondary condition of defense had been quietly set at
Task Force X's guns. There was no hurry about the change of watch. The
troops, unaware, did not stop their laughter.

At six-thirty o'clock the watch officer on our signal bridge answered
the phone, then clamped his binoculars to his eyes and tried to make them
pierce the dark astern. "Unidentified plane bearing one-eight-oh," was
what the telephone had told him.

"One-eight-oh," he pleaded to the lookouts. "Can't anybody see anything?"

Nothing! Darkness came swiftly, and the watch officer dropped his glass
and let it hang by its strap while he rubbed his tired eyes.

As silently as the drift of a falling star there was alight thread of
fire down the sky. It ended abruptly and at its end a ghastly flower bloomed.
The watch officer dropped his hands from his startled eyes and stood, legs
spread, staring up at it. The strange flower cast a powerful heliotrope-white
light, hard, searching, relentless. As slow as his stopped heart--mine,
too, for I stood beside him--it was floating down off our port quarter. He
lurched against me, falling toward the communication phone an arm's length away.

"Flare!" he cried into it. "Flare off the port quarter, sir! ... No,
sir, it is not a rocket! It is an enemy flare! ... Sound general quarters!"
he called down a voice tube.

The "da-a-a-a, da-a-a-a-a-a-a-, da-a-a-a" beat of the horn calling to
quarters filled the ship with its alarm. The sound overflowed the ship and
out into the night, adding the portent of sound to the freezing portent of
that drifting light.

"They're lighting us up!" the young watch officer shouted over the hubbub.

A second magnesium flare was falling, this time off the starboard quarter.
We could see its small white parachute in the light of the first flare. Out
of the side of my eyes I was conscious of a destroyer boiling past astern,
wide open.

The second flare was perfectly timed. No sooner was it fully alight
than the first one spluttered and died. There was no diminution in the hard
hellish light that beat down on us. It glared--that light--with a coldness,
a relentlessness impossible to describe. It seemed to sear into your skin,
into your bones. "Find a shade from that hell's moonlight" was what instinct
told you to do. Dart this way and that like a panicked animal caught in a
killer's torch. Those who have experienced all the terrors of this Pacific
war say there is but one experience that exceeds the feeling of nakedness
under enemy flares. That is the sudden blinding illumination by enemy searchlight
opening a night naval battle.

I had a tin hat. It was three decks below in my cabin. I do not remember
the ladders between. I was there in the dark cabin and the turtleback,
round, sand paper feel of the helmet was under my hand. It was where I had
left it, atop the life preserver. It felt heavy, but comforting on my number
head. The life preserver collar turned in and caught, as it always does, as
I struggled into the left arm hole, and I remember cursing it terribly between
closed teeth as the loudspeaker's giant voice said, "Troops lay below!
All troops return to quarters on the double! Troops lay below!"

I sad on the edge of the bunk and tried to think in the darkness. What
kind of attack was coming? "Troops lay below." That did not indicate anything.
The troops would be marshaled there in any sort of attack. They
must be got out of the way, so the ship could be fought. They must be assembled
and held under discipline by their officers. A thousand men out of hand could
immobilize a ship, choke her passageways, impede her damage control, her
fire-fighting details. They only place for transport troops in an attack,
poor devils, is where they live, in the holds. But a torpedo, with men
massed below--No! No torpedoes, please God. High-level bombing attack.
Surface attack. Make it one of those. And while you are on the line, listen
to the reporter's lament once more: O Lord, if I only had a gun, if I had
only been born a kid gunner or a kid gunnery ensign, with something to hang
to, some to do instead of ---

The way to deck was up a long corridor past two battle lamps, up the
main stairway and into a small foyer lounge. The grand stairway was amidship,
and on each deck where it made a landing there was a small lounge. They
were all brightly lighted, but controlled by door switches. When the doors
out to deck were opened, the lights went out and plunged the place into
sudden and startling darkness. They came blasting on again when the door
clicked shut. Infantry officers, medical-staff men who had no troops to
command, were sitting thereon the edges of ridiculous gold Louis XVI chairs
and a long pink divan. Dan Coffey, looking like a warrior, towered over
them. His helmet, with a "D.C" lettered in white for a crest, was as huge
as Achilles' and painted bright green. His Mae West life jacket was green
also, one of the new kapok jackets that have been treated with fireproof paint.

"Now I've got you in a good place," he said. "The main deck will hold
back some of the stuff comin' down topside. Anything drivin' up from below
won't reach you, unless the ammunition goes. Stay here!." He yanked open
the door and the lights went out and he was gone.

Outside, there was a different light on the sea. It was not heliotrope-white,
but a hard blue. It made the transport on our starboard quarter look
arsenic green, with high lights on the green and deep black shadows. There
was a figure at the rail, straining out and looking aloft. It was Father
Foley in his battle helmet. I leaned out beside him.

There was a blue burst hanging above our masthead. It was like a 4th of
July firework of my youth called, I believe, on the Pioneer Club's picnic
programs, Floating Stars.

"Light," a deep voice reported on the deck above, a calm, official-sounding
voice. "Light bearing about one-five-oh. Looks like a small searchlight
signal. Do you see it, captain?"

Father Foley and I saw the light, a small yellow eye, either on or
close above the water. There was a second one just like the first on the
starboard beam. Then there was another off the bow. They were not searchlight
signals; they were Mitsubishi 97's, Japan's two-motored torpedo
bombers, signaling their positions to each other. The blue star burst
overhead was their signal to attack.

Their motors sounded now. They were smooth and humming at first, but
rapidly they grew in dissonance, clanking and roaring. Their roar was wiped
out by a tremendous single blast of our ship's whistle, the commodore's
signal for an emergency turn. The deck tilted slowly under our feet as
the big ship answered her hard-over helm. She was singing into the sound
of the planes.

Ahead the sick night sparked with a train of small white-hot beads
strung on a white-hot wire. It was 20-mm. tracer coming from a destroyer's
gun, our opening fire. There were a dozen trains of the jumping fire now,
and a distant popping, like firecrackers sputtering, with the blind roar
of the angry motors. Then such ah great chattering and barking burst from
our own ship that she trembled and jiggled and the air was a crazy carnival
of yells and roars and screams and millions of white-hot tracers crossing
and crisscrossing out over the water.

FIRST BLOOD

A Mitsubishi's port motor exhaust was streaking blue flame like a
comet right in the thickest of the mad dance of tracers, and then, lit by
the tracer light, we could see the lunatic plane. It was flying crazily
past our swinging bow, not twenty feet off the water. It seemed to be
propoising in the air, for its course was up and then down, as if it were
hopping hedges.

Our whistle roared again. It was doubly terrifying this time, for our
every nerve end and cell were poised, waiting for the impact of the torpedo
the Mitsubishi must have launched out in the darkness. We could hear the
20-mm.'s again. They had been barking all the time, but our ears had shut
them out. They were hammering the plane unmercifully. They were stinging
it to death with white-hot hornets. The tracer was hitting and mashing in
red rosettes on its wings, its fuselage. It was tasting destruction--not
us. It carried on past our length, slid weakly another length, and then it
did what enemy planes do in dreams--it plunged into the sea. The splash
was not water but licking yellow flames and a puff of black, ascending smoke,
and in the light of that fire our guns slowed down and stopped. Only far
away there was firing like laughing little firecrackers.

In the silence I turned my head to speak to Father Foley. He was not
there, and I could not have spoken anyway, for my throat was rasping and
on fire. I ended up in a mad spasm of choking that bent me double and
stitched my side. Then I saw the father. All rosy in the light of the
burning plane, he was slowly rising from his knees. He looked at the
doomed plane.

"Good boys," he said. "Good boys."

And then for a breath there was actual silence that seemed thick enough
to cut. Out of it, faintly, like an echo, deep throated, many-throated, the
cheer of our troops came up from the hold. The news that we had killed had
cascaded down deck by deck and just reached them. And our gunners, as if
this tribute from their brothers in arms in the holds made them aware that
it was not easy to stay below and wait, cheered back. The courage of action
saluting the courage and duty of passivity, instinctively done in a breath,
a passing breath in the midst of action, and beautiful because of that.

FIVE TO NOTHING

The distant chatter of machine-gun fire went on. It came from across
the convoy, far over on the port side. Then the destroyers were firing up
ahead. And blown by a gusty wind, the mad dog swept around us again. We
were firing. The transports on both sides were firing. Everywhere was a
wild, drumming whirlwind of sound and fury and fear and hate, plane motors,
mad 20-mm. fire and men's shouting and our great whistle all mixed up
together. And the, quite suddenly, it was all over.

Four Mitsubishis were burning on the sea. Ours, the first one, was far
astern charring down now. The others were to port. In the heart of the
four small bonfires were the Japanese bomber crews, dying or quickly dead.
For some reason that thought did not come at once, but at the end of the
marvel that we had won, and when it did come, it inspired no feeling of
kindred suffering or even pity. It inspired nothing at all.

In the lounge the Army had obeyed Dan Coffey. The officers were still
sitting on the edges of the gold-painted chairs. The only change in the scene
was the ashtray standing in midfloor. It was overflowing with cigarette
butts. They were heaped in a mound in the tray and seemed to be flowing
over its rim and dripping on the floor like foam from a tankard of ale.

"We are enjoying a lull," the loudspeaker said. Our captain himself
was making the announcement. "The score is four or five to nothing. Troops
stand easy."

The medical major stirred a wan hand and one by one pulled loose the bow
knots that held his jacket. Then he lifted his heavy helmet and set it,
crown down, in his lap.

A thing like this," he said, "consumes a great deal of adrenalin."

The score was five to nothing. Up on the bridge I heard the last score
come in. The sea was peacefully asleep in gentle moonlight again. Astern,
the fires form the Japanese planes had died too. All that was left of the
battle was a smell, very faint and lingering. It was the clean acridity of
American smokeless powder. The commodore and the captain, side by side,
were leaning, with elbows hooked, over the wind screen. Their baggy trousers
hang over their identical rumps exactly alike. The commodore was chewing
abstractedly on a match stem. They might have been two successful wheat
farmers or a pair of crony bankers on a fishing holiday, hanging over a fence
swapping yarns in the moonlight. The raucous voice of the intership radio
came from the bridge house. A destroyer was reporting.

"Pennant calling Standard," the dark metallic voice said, as if bored
with life. "Pennant calling Standard. Take over, please. Pennant calling
Standard," the destroyer said. "There is another Jap plane in the water here.
DId not catch fire. Two-engine Mitsubishi. Two Japs in the water. What
shall do? Come in, please."

"Too 'em two cans of C ration," a low voice quickly said over the phone.
It was an eavesdropping destroyer, trying to be funny. The commodore snorted
and hurried across the deck and took the phone.

"No more of that!" he barked. "Clear the air, you! ... Standard to
Pennant: Make sure of position, then return to screen. Over!"

"Pennant to Standard," the bored destroyer said. "Understood."

The commodore strolled back to his place beside the captain.

"We'll let NOB [Naval Operating Base] send out in the morning and bring them in," he said.
"I'd like to see one of those planes myself. Harry probably wanted to pick
up those men, but this is not the time for it. We may not be done with this
business yet."

He resumed chewing the frayed white matchstick.

"Oh, I think so, Bill," said the captain.

The wardroom was half full when the "Secure from general quarters" command
came. There was a movement of release in the room, a pick-up in the hum
of conversation. Men reared out of chairs and peeled off life jackets that
had been hanging open, and tossed them into corners. The stewards who had
not been at the guns brought out the coffee that had been kept simmering.
Outside there were scattered catcalls and the sound of running feet. Part
of the gun crews were coming off the guns, and they were going below to
swagger with the troops.

"Did we le 'em?" came a shrill voice. "How'd you like those apples,
Army? Five of those yellow --------."

The infantry officers, who had been below with the men, came up after a
time. Their brown shirts were the same color all over, as soaked with sweat
as if they had fallen into the sea. A big captain undid the cuff of his shirt
and twisted it in a red-furred fist.

"Well," he grinned at Don Coffey, letting the wrung-out sweat rivulet
through his fingers and splash on the floor, "guess you did a pretty good
job for us. We got one, I hear."

"I'm going to put the name of that port-bridge-wing gun in," said Dan.
"He was on that plane from way over here"--Dan pointed off his right shoulder--"to
the time that damned Jap cleared astern. Those boys were changing magazines
so fast they were tossin' them up and catchin' them in the slot. ... Henderson!"

Our big chief steward, a six-foot-six colored boy from Harlem, was just
getting into his white coat. He stepped up, buttoning the last button, and
stood very straight.

"Yes, sir," he said.

A D D E N D U M

This action the author is writing about took place on 17 February 1943.
The ships involved were the USS Jackson (APA-18), USS Adams (APA-19),
USS Hays (APA-20), USS Crescent City (APA-21), a tanker whose number and name
I no longer remember. It was, however, the first tanker to be taken to
Guadalcanal and was traveling in our convoy at a speed of about 12 knots.
(In a convoy you can only go as fast as the slowest ship, which in our case
was the tanker, thus 12 knots).

On the night in question the USS Crescent City was the flag ship and
Commodore I.N. Kiland was in command. We were passing through what
euphemistically was called sunset pass--between the islands of San Cristobal
and Rennell. We would usually reach this area about sundown (thus the name
sunset pass) in order to anchor off Guadalcanal in the early morning hours.

I was a corpsman in the forward battle station in #2 hole. We had
just secured from general quarters which would be ½ hour after sunset and
it was black out. I had climbed down from the gun platform and had taken
only a few steps on the main deck when a star shell broke over our bow--at
that instant we had started a hard 90° turn to starboard and general quarters
again was sounded. We all immediately were at our stations. Many things
happened over the next 55 minutes of night action. Piecing it together later
over shaking cups of coffee and cigarettes, it went something like the following.

The Japs had laid a trap for us and we rode right into it unknowingly.

Submarines were lying in wait on each side so that we would pass between
them. The Jap aircraft were to light us up for the subs to knock us off.
Again, which so often happened in that war out there, luck or providence was
on our side. Just after we had secured form general quarters and about the
time my foot hit the main deck (I had gone up on the gun platform to shoot
the bull), the Commodore noticed a blinker light near (I think) Rennell
island. He started the convoy to turn hard starboard--the star shell borke
and general quarters sounded--all at about the same time. We found out later
that two Jap subs were still on the surface and evidently didn't expect us
so soon, or something. At any rate, they must have been giving each other
last minute instructions before submerging. Whatever the reason, the
Commodore, always alert and on the ball, started the ships to change course
immediately. Thank God he did because we were lit up like a Christmas Turkey
with star shells of 10,000,000 candle power falling all over the place and
torpedoes were coming at us from every direction. Aircraft were diving on
us from all angles and were bound to get that tanker. I learned later that
the plane we shot down was crossing our fan tail and our gunners had placed
the fuse setting on the 5" shell at its shortest explosive range, fired and
blew the plane apart. The plane had lined up to launch its torpedo at the
tanker which was off our starboard quarter at about 1,000 yards when we blew
it apart. Shortly after this an explosion occurred off our quarter, we could
not tell which starboard or port which shook the ship like a cat would a rat.
We thought at first that we had taken a hit from a torpedo. Fortunately this
was not true. It was only a near miss or else the torpedo was of the acoustic
type and exploded near our propeller--we never found out. (Later in dry dock
in Wellington, N.Z., we found some ruptured plates on the hull on the after
part of the port side low down. Fortunately not serious enough to cause
much damage.)

BM1/c Max House, who was a big man, some 6'3" and 220 pounds, for reasons
unknown, started running up the port ladder across the boat deck down the
starboard ladder across the main deck and up the port ladder again. This
continued during the entire 55 minutes battle. Max was the gun captain on
the two twin mount forties aft and just above and forward of the 5" gun on
the fan tail. When the battle was over, the guys asked me to talk with
Max. They wanted me to stop him while he was running, but no way would I
do this. (The reason I was asked to do this was Max and I were friends--as
Max wsa friends with all us corpsmen, my name popped out first I guess.) At
any rate, when the battle was over I slapped Max on the shoulder and said
let's go have a cup of coffee--he snapped right back into the living world
and said okay. Max never knew what happened or that he had been running the
full time--that whole period of time from the first star shell until I slapped
his shoulder remained a blank. As far as I know, this never occurred to
Max again. I shudder to think what would have happened to me if I had tried
to stop this big guy from running!!

The outcome of the battle was five Jap planes shot down and three and
possibly four subs sunk by our destroyers, without a casualty in either
ships or men to our side. It was one hellava show, and one not to ever be
forgotten. I know of nothing more terrifying than night fighting on ships
at sea ....

It might also be added that we had with us a brand new flush deck destroyer
just out from the States. She had the new fire control automatic
computer system. I was top side and saw her shoot down a plane with her new
system. At first the destroyer tried to manually turn her turrets, then all
of a sudden I saw the turret turn very quickly, guns position and fire, miss,
make the correction, shoot and hit. It was so fast I could hardly believe
my eyes. It was months later when I found out what had happened. The gunnery
officer came aboard our ship to have his teeth taken care of and I was in the
dental office at the time. He related to us that was the first time for them
in action and that they were not sure just how well the system would work.
Needless to say, it worked very well.

Commodore Kiland received the Navy Cross for this action. We got a
"well done" from ADM Halsey. Commodore Kiland was later promoted to Rear
AdmiraL and retired from the Naval Service as a Vice Admiral, having attained
that rank during the Korean War. He lives on Coronado Island in San Diego,
California.

Just before dawn, our ship's forward deck seemed carpeted with casualties.
Over every square foot of space down there, curved around bitts, half draped
over spars, pillowed in shell cleats, sprawled one across another with heads
mingling with feet, backs across bellies, our men lay asleep. The color of
their wet shirts was bright in the moonlight. The brown of the Army and the
faded blue dungarees of the Navy were all mixed up together.

On the bridge, the two classmates were still at the wind screen. They
might not have moved, save that the moonlight shone white on a pair of sneakers
the captain had donned since I had last seen him. His feet hurt him and he
had slipped into something comfortable.

"We're an hour behind ETA (expected time of arrival)," volunteered the
commodore. "Those damn Japs cost us an hour."

Through the fine pair of Mark VI binoculars mounted on the rail, I could
see our landfall. It was a long way off, but I could see the metallic shine
of its coconut groves. Guadalcanal was still and waiting ahead in the moonlight.